I bet I’ll still be getting my morning coffee from a Pole after Brexit
Ukip’s restrictive line on immigration won’t carry the day because we would have to give up too much
On the morning after the June 23 referendum last year, Michael Gove’s wife Sarah articulated the emotions of many Brexiteers, who had campaigned to leave but were not prepared for actually winning the vote. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off,” she told the former cabinet minister. The sentiment was well chosen since those immortal words were uttered by Michael Caine in the film The Italian Job; and Caine was one of a small group of celebrities who was in favour of pulling out of the EU.
In an interview on Sky News the other day, Sir Michael was asked why he supported Brexit: “I would rather be a poor master than a rich servant,” he said. For him it was an opportunity to be an independent country once more. “It wasn’t about the racism, immigrants or anything, it was about freedom.” Imagine if that case, and only that case, had been made during the referendum campaign; if all those favouring Leave had said that their aim was for Britain to stay within the single market while severing the country’s political and judicial links with the EU.
In other words, to achieve what many who voted to stay in 1975 thought they were getting – membership of a Common Market while remaining a broadly independent nation. Would Leave then have won? The conventional wisdom holds that the vote was principally a repudiation of large-scale immigration. Indeed, Theresa May has framed her Government’s entire Brexit policy around an assumption that the country would simply not accept the continued free movement of people from Europe into the UK.
Since just over 16 million people voted to remain and many of the 17.4 million who voted to leave did so on the same basis that Caine did, it is questionable to assert that the country as a whole wanted to end free movement. Undoubtedly, in some parts curbing immigration was the overriding motivation and these voters tipped the balance; but that is not the same as saying that most people agree with that approach or that the Government should solely address the concerns of a minority however strongly felt. Even Boris Johnson, writing in this newspaper days after the referendum, did not believe immigration was the main driver for Leave: “After meeting thousands of people in the course of the campaign, I can tell you that the number one issue was control,” he declared.
During the referendum there were two Leave camps. Boris and Gove belonged to the mainstream, more globalist team that rarely played the immigration card. Nigel Farage and Ukip were the provisional wing of Brexit, focusing on the free movement issue that offended the sensibilities of their fellow Leavers and delivering enough votes to push Brexit over the line.
Now the latter, fearing the globalists are gaining the upper hand, are making their move. A report published this week by the Ukip MEP Steven Woolfe calls for a freeze on all unskilled immigration for five years and a tough points system for skilled migrants seeking British visas. He claimed this “fair, flexible and forwardthinking policy” would bring net immigration to the UK down to 50,000 after Brexit.
But what would its impact be on the lifestyles that many have come to enjoy, especially in cities like London? I was in a Starbucks yesterday getting my early morning coffee. On the wall was a board with the names of staff and there was not an identifiably British employee among them. The same is true in thousands of bars, hotels, sandwich shops and fast-food outlets up and down the country. Moreover, while these may be described as low-skilled jobs they are often occupied by high-skilled workers – young, well-educated and polite eastern Europeans who may be in the country for a year or two to earn some money and improve their English.
Walking to the station, a distance of around a mile, I heard half a dozen conversations in Slavic languages among builders working on homes. Both of these experiences were inconceivable just 20 years ago. I grew up when the only high-street food outlet was a Wimpy and if you wanted coffee you might get a Nescafé in a Lyons Corner House. Now there are few city centre roads not crammed with food and drinks emporiums.
You could make a convincing argument for saying life would not come to an end if they all had to close; less convincingly, you might suggest that if the young foreigners were all replaced by British staff then Starbucks, Nandos and the rest could carry on as before. But while there are hundreds of thousands of young unemployed Brits, are they willing, or even capable, of taking many of these jobs, much as we would like them to?
So as the Government struggles to devise a post-Brexit immigration policy we have to ask whether we are prepared to see a lot of the things on which we have come to rely over the past 20 years – from decent coffee and plentiful fruit pickers to cheap carpenters and care home nurses – scaled back substantially?
We could devise a visa system that matches people with the skills needed for a certain job, as happens under the points-based systems in Canada and Australia. But if the Government adopts a demand-led approach, employers will ask for permission to bring in just as many workers from overseas as they do now. And they will either still have to come from the EU or from elsewhere in the world. Or we will not have the services.
This reality has dawned on ministers who were determined to bear down on net migration. The target of reducing the figure from 300,000 or so a year to the tens of thousands still remains but it can only be achieved with the sort of lifestyle upheaval that most voters will not accept. On the other hand, Ukip and its supporters will accept nothing less.
Which way will the Government go? I suspect that in five years’ time my morning coffee will still be served by a bright young graduate from Poland and the conversation among builders in my road will be carried out predominantly in a foreign language. For the moment, Brexit feels a bit like that gold-laden bus teetering on the edge of the abyss at the end of The Italian Job, when Caine’s character says: “Hang on lads, I’ve got a great idea”. We are still waiting to hear what it is.